K45: Strategies - Technology

Reducing / Eliminating / Reversing Atmospheric

Greenhouse Gases

Strategy… to Accomplish What?• 1. Is our goal to return to a state of stable sea level close to

today’s? Stable temperatures, and a stable climate? This is either impossible, or will require MASSIVE, IMMEDIATE and wrenching change to society as we know it

• 2. Or, is our goal to do what we can to slow our descent into climate chaos, but not at the price of economic growth or population freedom? This is more do-able, still requires very large political and economic changes. It still results in a ( less) disastrous future for thousands of years, compared to business-as-usual.

• You decide, students – it is more your world than mine: Alas, you will inherit what my generation and those before have left you.

To Identify Technologies, We Need to Appreciate the Scale of the Problem

• 93% of greenhouse heating has gone into the ocean, which has 700 times more thermal capacitance than the atmosphere, and where it will prevent the thin atmosphere above it from cooling off at all – for thousands of years – even if we halt ALL CO2 emissions and somehow re-freeze Arctic permafrost and halt other methane release

• The Arctic permafrost will continue to thaw since temperatures will not go back down, and this methane therefore will contribute greenhouse forcing at poorly known levels, even if we end industrial civilization overnight.

• +1.5C is enough to thaw the entire Siberian permafrost, and likely the rest of the Earth’s permafrost (Vaks et al., and Lawrence et al. 2007)

• +2C is virtually certain to be inevitable, and climate negotiators have said only a complete cessation of all industrial civilization will prevent +2C. We’re at +0.99C today, and rising.

From NASA/Goddard Space Science Institute’s Prof. James Hansen…

• “The paleoclimate record makes it clear that a target to keep human made global warming less than 2°C, as proposed in some international discussions, is not sufficient - it is a prescription for disaster. Assessment of the dangerous level of CO2, and the dangerous level of warming, is made difficult by the inertia of the climate system. The inertia, especially of the ocean and ice sheets, allows us to introduce powerful climate forcing such as atmospheric CO2 with only moderate initial response. But that inertia is not our friend - it means that we are building in changes for future generations that will be difficult, if not impossible to avoid." 

James Hansen July 2011  

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_15/

Therefore, Even With Little or No Further Human-Caused CO2 emissions… +2C will

Happen This Century

• At today’s 400ppm CO2, sea levels rise inexorably for many centuries, rising eventually ~80 feet or more

• From Ice Age paleo data which had much milder forcing, expect at some point pulses of sea level rise of ~+2 ft per decade lasting centuries, making it impossible to build ports or conduct international trade in any form resembling today.

To Halt Climate Change…• Requires immediate end to all carbon emissions, including

those from livestock and tropical methane sources• Requires preventing tipping point thawing of the Arctic

carbon sources (if that’s still possible)• Requires re-freezing the West Antarctic so it may re-

anchor to the grounding line• Requires pulling heat from the oceans to the atmosphere

where, with low enough CO2, it may radiate to space• This requires not only a cessation of all carbon emissions,

it requires a massive commitment to developing and deploying a technology for CO2 removal from the atmosphere, significantly in addition to that naturally due to oceans and plants, and finding somewhere to put it which is stable long term.

At This Late Date, it Requires a COOLING World

• …to halt polar thaw.• But it is change per se, which is so damaging to ecosystems

and human civilization, in either warming or cooling direction.

• Think of the danger in engineering this. Climate change now in the cooling direction

• Think of the massive political and social resistance that such a climate shift would cause, and ask whether you think we will do it, just for the sake of future generations unborn.

• When Paris, London, Florida, Venice,…. are underwater, it will be too late to recover those priceless heritage cities by re-freezing the poles.

So while “Let’s all ride bikes to solve global warming” sounds wonderful, it’s just nowhere near the level of

wrenching change necessary

These Goals Are in Sharp Conflict with the Aims of the Third World Nations, the

Existing Energy Corporations, Our Political Structure, and Civilization’s

Infrastructure

• Global CO2 diffusion time is weeks. My CO2 is EVERYone’s CO2 very quickly

• In a competitive world, this is a big problem• Counting on global voluntary action to solve this, is noble…

and futile. Only GLOBAL government enforced policy action of an extreme nature could hope to halt climate change. Since there is no GLOBAL government nor prospect of one which could enforce this, I am not optimistic

China and India together emit almost twice the CO2 as the U.S., and mostly from coal, and new coal plants continue to be built, albeit at a slowing rate late in 2015. Other growing

Asian countries add to this..

Global Carbon Emissions. Not just totals, but the actual RATE of emissions, continue to increase (but 2015 shows a pause), mostly from Asia. In the new century, carbon emissions are rising at DOUBLE the rate (3%/year)

that they were in the final quarter of the 20th century.

So it’s a VERY tough Reversal that is needed. What technology Ideas are there

for helping us minimize the necessary pain to Civilization?

• A. Alternative energy ideas• B. Reducing carbon from existing energy

sources

A. Alternative Energy Ideas

Potentially, Solar Energy Dwarfs All Other Sources, Wind Next

Wind, Hydro, Solar, Geothermal Energy Sources

• Astrophysicist Frank Shu argues (Shu 2008) that the most promising energy sources which can compete in the sheer volume of energy which our society currently requires, are…

• --- solar photovoltaics• --- nuclear power• --- Others argue Wind and Geothermal

also make some sense.

Wind Turbines: Energy Return on Investment

• EROI = “Energy Return on Investment”; How long does it take to recover the energy you invested in manufacture and operation?

• EROI for commercial wind turbines is ~7 months.

• Wind produces ~12g of carbon per MWh of power over the life of the turbine, which is tiny.

The “Wind Turbines Kill Birds” Myth

• Fossil fuel interests complain commercial wind turbines kill large numbers of birds.

• Even granting for the moment that the fossil fuel corporations and their paid promoters which make these claims actually care about birds, the claim is vastly untrue...

• Wind turbines kill 0.27 birds/Gwh, while fossil fueled power plants kill 9.4 birds/Gwh, or 50x greater Sovocool (2012).

• Even nuclear kills more birds (0.6 per Gwh) than wind.

And For Birds, Wind Farms are the Least of their Worries

Wind, Solar Unpredictable. Very tough on a current grid built for predictability

Still, Wind is Gaining at a modest linear rate, Now 5% of U.S. Generating Power

Hydroelectric Power

Hydroelectric is very cost effective

• But, most of the usable and economical sites are already dammed; it’s not scalable, is costly to local ecologies, and extremely expensive and damaging to remove dams once they silt up.

• Also, climate-caused drought will hurt mid-latitude river flows going forward.

• Can be constant on (unlike wind, solar)…. Until reservoir runs dry, or silts up… then constant off!

Geothermal Energy

• In rare places it is high grade and very cost-effective (like Iceland), but most places you can only access average annual temperature, via digging many meters down with pipes and access low-grade thermal energy which is slow to replenish, given low conductivity of soils.

• This is still quite useful to do for heating and cooling homes and should be more adopted than it is.

• No good for high-grade needs like fuel, transportation, etc.

Solar Photovoltaics: Good…• Solar PV’s Advantages:• --- rapidly getting cheaper• --- carbon nanotube-based solar may provide improved

power/cost ratios• --- rooftop panels allow distributed systems “off the grid”

and therefore • *** provide no easy targets for terrorists (cyber-terrorism

threatens all, but individual rooftop least)• *** allow energy independence and are the ultimate in

“local”, motivating their care by owners• --- few if any moving parts to break, only occasional

further investment (batteries mainly) once purchased• --- in warm climates, rooftop systems also lower heat

load to structures, lowering air conditioning costs. As the Earth warms, more and more of us will be in “warm climates”

Solar Rooftop System in Germany. Large Subsidies Helped get Solar Going in this

Cloudy Northern Country

With subsidies and govt support, global solar installations growing. But Europe (blue) lately has scaled back support.

More widespread ending of subsidies scheduled for end of 2016

Solar PV Accessible Power Potential, Including Cloud Cover

Solar PV price/watt 1977-2011

Solar PV module costs 1985-2011

Cost For Solar vs. Fossil Fuels: Improving Every Year. (dollars per GigaJoule).

(In 2015, strong price decline in fossil fuels, however)

Solar and Wind are Rising as Percentage of US total Power

But Govt. Subsidies Have Had a Strong Effect on the Spread of Solar

Energy

• Nothing inherently wrong with this, especially given the huge subsidies ongoing for fossil carbon

• But, the Solar Investment Tax Credit is ending in 2016 (Bloomberg), and the subsidy end in Europe clearly has had a major impact on spread. Loss in the U.S. predicted to be 80,000 jobs also.

Solar and Wind Levelized Costs now getting almost as low as Coal in 2013

Levelized Cost of Solar PV Declining 15%/year Lately (idealized graph).

Levelized=total cost over lifetime of the unit, annualizedLCOE=levelized cost of electricity

But can these costs continue to fall?

• Technology advances have wrung most of the theoretical Carnot efficiency out of solar already. The theoretical maximum for a single-junction cell is 34%

• Modern PV cell efficiencies range from the high teens to 44% for the most advance (non-commercial) multi-junction cells, very close to the theoretical 48% maximum.

• However, the cost of these cells is ~100x the cheaper cells, while delivering only ~4x the efficiency

Unlike Moore’s Law, Solar’s future efficiency gains will be quite slow

More Important for Cost…

• The technological gains in efficiency are mostly already accomplished, as are the gains due to economies of manufacturing scale.

• Solar is already a significant industry, with scaling mostly accomplished, especially by the Chinese

• Gains will likely continue, but be significantly slower

• BEWARE of promoters who simply extrapolate past curves into the future, ignoring the true source of costs!

Polysilicon Prices – Past Decade. Price spike due to shortage, then a glut, and stable cost past 2 years

Remaining Solar PV Costs…

• …are in labor and materials, electronic componentry like inverters, which have already matured and are not plummeting in cost

• For the panels alone, solar PV is down to $0.61/watt - but total installed cost for a homeowner is 7 times higher; $4/watt

• These fact argue that the large drops in solar costs have already occurred, and future drops will be more incremental

As of 2014: (source)• Hardware: $1.76 per watt (44% of total cost)• Install Labor and Electrician: $0.68 per watt (17% of

total cost)• Permits: $0.08 per watt (2% of total cost)• Marketing/Outreach: $0.82 per watt (20% of total

cost)• Overhead/Profit: $0.66 per watt (17% of total cost)• Total cost of system: $4 per watt ($16,000 for typical

home)• Unless these costs can come down at high rates

(not likely), simple extrapolation of past trends is too rosy a projection

The Inconsistent Sun• Power generation is at the mercy of weather, and completely

unavailable at night• Power needs are greater in cold climates, but those are also where the

sun is weakest• Typical duty cycle means a “1 GW solar plant” is actually only able to

deliver ~20% of that 1GW averaged over a year of night time, weather, cleaning, etc.

• Requires better battery technology to be feasible for high powered society (says Elon Musk). Progress is happening here.

• And requires a completely different grid based on the highly variable and unpredictable outputs of solar (and wind). Expensive to re-build such infrastructure

• Still, even given the existing power grid, rooftop solar can be a no-brainer for feeding energy into the grid and lowering carbon footprint and lowering personal utility bills

Solar Panels Covering Canals. More Surface Area Put to Good Use, Cutting

Evaporation as Well

Load Balancing When Renewables Are Included

• Our grid requires precise 60 hz current be always available. Different power sources can accommodate to the varying load and inherent inability of solar and wind to output consistently.

• Nuclear: always on, full tilt• Coal, hydro, can easily ramp up/down as

needed• Solar, wind can ramp down. Not up

Going 100% Solar PV: Area Required is “Small”. A PV Panel Area the Size of Egypt Could Supply the World today, but

need 40% more by 2030 (Dept Energy)

Utility-Scale Solar Farms

Is Utility-Scale the Way to Go?

• Utilities are trying to take advantage of subsidies and cheap desert land leases, and also keep control of the electric power supply by building vast solar farms.

• But these impact sensitive habitat, are ugly, and require expensive transmission line losses compared to local solar.

• Local (rooftop) solar, though… not enough rooftop area to power the world

Utility-Scale Solar Farms: Shadowing Local Flora

• This is a problem with current massive solar farms… they are incompatible with the local ecology

• Research at UCSC on solar cells which are transparent at wavelengths needed by plants, and placed much higher, minimizing local ecological damage

• See local news

Topaz Solar Farm: borders Carrizo Plain National Monument, home to many endangered species and the last large tract of unspoiled California Great Valley

ecosystem. Additional Space given to lessen effect on local animals.

Combining Utility Solar + Wind

• Home-based wind systems not as efficient as utility-scale wind because wind velocities are much lower near ground level. Although is still worth doing in some places (like Salinas Valley?)

Solar: Utility Scale, or Rooftop?

•

Hernandez et al. (2015) find that roof-top solar can supply 3-5x more energy than needed to power California (behind paywall Nature: Climate Change , and discussed here)

Solar Roadways and Bikeways?

• Heavily criticized as too expensive and fragile when first announced, the company SolaRoads is having some success in their testing of a solar bikeway, producing good solar power, expected to produce 70 kwh/year per square meter when finished.

• The road/bike way has solar panels protected by thick shatter-proof glass.

• Will it work? Tempting; It’s a lot of ground area otherwise wasted, but it’s a tough environment and robust performance still unproven, and how expensive to route resulting power?

Solar Manufacture: Carbon Cost

• 2008 study found 280 kwh to produce 1 square meter of solar panel

• Some more recent advertising claims are of 1.4 years to pay back carbon footprint.

• 2-3 years payback is more the average seen in current literature.

• ~25 year life of a panel, so roughly 10x carbon value in solar vs. fossil fuel

• 280 kwh/m2 means about 2.2x1014 kwh needed to make enough solar panels to power the world

1 Kwh of power, generated by a mix of fossil fuels, generates about 2.2 lb of CO2

• So that’s 2.2 x 2.2e14 lb of CO2 to make enough solar panels to power the Earth

• That’s 2.4 x 10^11 tons of CO2• That’s 240 gigatons of CO2 , or about 7 years

of total current global emissions of CO2 from all sources. That’s a lot.

• And that’s a significant underestimate - you’d have to first build the infrastructure to make all those factories before powering them. And the supporting industry (inverters, etc)

Battery Technology• How to power our transportation – cars, trucks,

rail? • A recent (Duduta et al. 2011) advance

in battery technology made at MIT is a hopeful sign. If it works as hoped, it may double the energy density of current batteries, and also make possible the ability to "fuel up" at the pump with an oil-like rechargable electrolyte much like we do with gasoline cars at the moment. Read about it here.

• A new all-liquid-metal battery technology suggests the possibility of very high storage densities at relatively low cost. “Flow batteries”.

• But, so far the electrolyte liquid doesn’t stay charged for very long

I’ve seen “Wonder Breakthroughs” Announced for Batteries for Many Years

• But, still not much has happened. Instead, incremental improvement in older technologies like lithium-ion. Musk agrees

• Wall Street saavy say: Strong danger of “conflict of interests” – announcements are often made as an inducement to attract venture capital, and are overly rosy in their claims. This is how Wall St. works, unfortunately.

The Nuclear Option

• Nuclear reactors, to describe, are just steam engines that use something other than wood or coal to stoke the boiler. They use the heat generated by nuclear fission reactions of certain heavy elements.

• Nuclear has some advantages:• --- it’s “always on”, unlike solar• --- its carbon emissions are minimal (even including

mining the uranium or thorium currently)• --- it’s very energy-dense and can supply a lot of power

in a small area, so is intriguing for use in technologies for pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Nuclear Fusion?• Fusing hydrogen into helium, as the sun does, releases 100x

more energy per pound than even nuclear fission, and the ocean has plenty of deuterium.

• Easier to fuse deuterium (D) and tritium (T), two heavy hydrogen isotopes.

• Incredibly attractive: inexhaustible D fuel, essentially no radioactive waste, and hybrid fission/fusion ideas can destroy otherwise long-lived nuclear waste, using some for energy.

• Incredibly difficult to confine D,T to high density and millions of Kelvin at the same time, so it’s still… “in the future”.

• Tritium, at the moment, can only be obtained by fission reactors. That’s a problem.

• However, Lockheed-Martin claims to be working on a compact fusion reactor which they say will work. We shall see…

Doc Brown to the Rescue? Not Quite yet

Back to Fission: Conventional Light-water Nuclear Reactor

Cooling and condensing steam back to liquid using cooling towers

Nuclear – the Advantages over Solar/Wind

• It’s “always on”, just like current carbon-fueled power plants. This means minimal change to an existing grid built with this assumption

• They can be sited almost anywhere, weather not relevant (cooling water is, for current designs though)

• Carbon footprint is very low, although on-going fueling and enrichment/security costs are significant vs no fuel costs for solar/wind

• We’ll discuss costs later

Nuclear – the Disadvantages vs. Solar/Wind: Safety

• All reactors are necessarily big and very expensive. No car-sized “Mr. Fusion” is on anyone’s horizon

• Safety - When they go wrong, they can go VERY wrong. Remember, in the real world, bad engineers get jobs too.

• They were economically viable only when the government stepped in to insure them. Are they economically viable when they must be privately insured? Any Libertarian wanting to support nuclear should consider that. Is no private company willing to insure a nuclear power plant? If there are premiums to be collected over/above the claims to be payed out, why are private insurance companies not looking to exploit this opportunity? …or have they in fact run their own risk/reward numbers and decided it’s not worth it? (this is not sarcasm, I’m genuinely wondering).

• There may be solutions to some of these… read on.

Nuclear – the Disadvantages: Waste• Nuclear Waste – conventional waste is radioactive for

tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Stolen waste can provide the material for a “dirty bomb” with no technological savvy required. A “dirty bomb” can spread radioactivity packaged around dynamite (for example) far and wide which can be much more damaging than the dynamite alone can do.

• Merely the threat of using such a bomb can apply great political leverage. Even low grade nuclear waste therefore provides a very tempting target for terrorists.

• There may be solutions to these problems. Read on…

• Nuclear power safety standards and enforcement are poor and needs major upgrades. This will significantly increase the cost of building reactors

• These problems do not exist for wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, and other renewables

Don’t worry about “The China Syndrome”, worry about the “Homer Simpson” Syndrome

• Nuclear Regulatory Commission employees caught surfing the web for porn while on the job (Washington Times article)

• Sleeping with the industry people (literally) that they’re supposed to be regulating.

How Many Reactors Are Operating Today?

• As of March 1, 2011, there were 443 operating nuclear power reactors spread across the planet in 47 different countries [source: WNA]. 66 new reactors are in planning or construction (source)

• In 2009 alone, atomic energy accounted for 14 percent of the world's electrical production. Break that down to the individual country and the percentage skyrockets as high as 76% for Lithuania and 75% for France [source: NEI].

• In the United States, 104 nuclear power plants supply 20 percent of the electricity overall.

Breeder Reactors – The Solution?

• Breeder reactors convert long-lived radioactive by-products into power and into (relatively) short-lived radioactive by-products – requiring storage for ~several centuries, rather than thousands of years as with conventional reactors. They produce nuclear fuel as they run, and so are also fuel-efficient.

• Capital costs are ~25% higher than for conventional reactors. With the abundance of Uranium, breeders were not thought economical, however with the worries about radioactive waste storage, they are now more interesting.

• Supplies will exhaust with current designs in a matter of decades, but with breeders and intelligent design using Thorium, could last for well over 1000 years at current power needs (Shu 2011)

• Require a large starter of U235 to provide fast neutrons for fissioning other nuclei. U235 is rare (0.7% of natural uranium is U235), but available, so expensive enriching facilities still needed.

• For the waste to be safe after just a few centuries, requires very high grade separation of actinide series chemical elements.

• From the Yale 360 forum, this article argues in favor of Breeder technology, and this is a rebuttal

Should we give Nuclear another chance?

• It’s possible that nuclear has been given an unfair knock from a few bad accidents. Need better oversight in engineering, and PRIVATE insurance, would insure lower odds of costly and dangerous accidents. It was, at one time, hailed as a clean and low-cost new power source…. before Chernobyl

• Chernobyl killed only 31 people directly, but estimates of excess cancer deaths from the radiation cloud range from 9,000 (U.N. and Atomic Energy Commission) to 25,000 (Union of Concerned Scientists) to ten times higher (Greenpeace) - it’s easy to see the correlation with “green”ness, but I myself am not in a position to say who’s most correct.

• Japan’s Fukishima disaster in 2011 is still being assessed, but was the only other “Level 7” nuclear disaster. Direct excess cancer deaths here are expected in the hundreds, although many argue this is too conservative.

• Mining of Uranium involves radon left in the tailings seeping into ground water, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and here, this adds about 40,000 excess cancer deaths per year, worldwide.

However ALL these death rates

Pale… • … in comparison to deaths caused by fossil fuels, even

without global warming’s eventual casualties• Black lung, emphysema, cancer, heart disease, air

pollution’s many other health effects. • 13,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone from coal dust• Even hydroelectric has a worse record than nuclear… A

string of dam failures in China once killed 230,000 people.

• Fossil Fuels kill 320 times more people per unit power produced than solar + nuclear combined…

• Adding in the deaths global warming will cause show that arguments about nuclear safety, by comparison, are a non-issue

• Fossil Fuels = 164 human deaths/TWh• Solar = 0.44 deaths/TWh• Nuclear = 0.04 deaths/TWh

But – a Big Problem with Nuclear is Rapidly Escalating Cost:

Even more serious - the Time to Get Permits For a 1 GW power plant: 13 yrs

for Nuclear vs. 1 yr for solar...

• Time we do not have.• During that time to permit, solar costs are

projected to continue to fall

Sobering as Nuclear’s Rising Costs Are…

• …They don’t include the cost of insuring the power plants against disaster

• Uninsurable?• Yes, says a study commissioned in Germany in

2011 (here) …• …finds that insurance would cost at least as

much as the electricity produced ($0.20/KwH), at a bare minimum, on up to 15 times the price of the electricity produced ($3.40/KwH)

A Lecture by Frank Shu in 2011

• Discusses the advantages and disadvantages of alternatives to “business as usual” and climate disaster

• Bottom line, solar is expensive (but he doesn’t mention that costs are dropping rapidly, nor include externalized costs!), carbon capture and sequestration he therefore concludes is the short term solution, and nuclear using breeders is the longer term solution, both to extend the limited nuclear fuel resources, and to “burn” existing nuclear waste.

• He does not mention nuclear cost escalations, does not mention the tax-and-dividend strategy which changes the cost arguments.

• Still, it’s a very worthwhile lecture on the details of how to do nuclear properly

• Lecture Nov 2011 to U. Michigan students, (43 min)

My Thoughts• I’m no nuclear expert, and ideological emotions cloud both sides of this pro/anti-nuke

debate, in my personal and reading experience. As I emphasize in Chapter 0, Nature doesn’t care about my opinion, or yours, only about the Truth. That said, here goes…

• The danger of climate change disaster rises with every new day of research that comes in. Beyond replacing fossil fuel energy currently, we MUST think seriously about removing existing CO2 from the atmosphere on a large scale. Carbon-neutral will not save us from serious and permanent climate change. I suspect the only feasible way of powering the large energy needed to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere may be nuclear power. Breeder technology is probably best, as it makes the most use of existing isotopes and insures the long term safest nuclear waste.

• What should power the grid into which your rooftop solar pumps its power? Perhaps nuclear, but again – only if it can be privately insured and safety from theft is absolutely insured. If insurance companies refuse to insure, that’s a bad indication. Others make arguments that a proper balance of renewables, especially wind, could still provide a stable grid. Given the existence of night, it would seem that stable power would have to be transmitted over vast international distances. Security?

• A de-centralized power grid, minimizing high tension lines from juicy terrorist-target big power plants, is a necessary goal, with power generated by rooftop solar as much as possible, and perhaps cellulosic or algae-based fuel in hybrid vehicles as a carbon-neutral strategy for transportation, where high power density is essential. There is a place for nuclear… whether that place is big or niche, remains uncertain.

• Fossil fuels need to be abandoned. The world’s naïve sentiment seems to be – “OK, maybe so, we’ll inch towards other power sources, but only so long as we don’t have to make any real sacrifices.” This attitude is a prescription for disaster!

But There’s an Even Bigger Problem with Going Nuclear…

• The rapidly rising CO2 emissions are coming from the 3rd world, not Europe and the U.S.

• We won’t solve climate change unless we eliminate nearly all carbon emissions GLOBALLY. So here’s the $64,000 question:

• Will the U.S. and Europe and their nuclear engineers provide the technology and knowledge and materials to countries like Egypt, Iran, African dictatorships, etc, to help them transform their energy system to nuclear, as they envy American wealthly lifestyles and energy footprints?

• Seems vastly unlikely, especially in a world entering an era of climate chaos and desperation from “have not” countries.

Rapidly Dropping Energy Costs are Making an Impact in Germany. But subsidies helped, and manufacturing from the

1st world has been rapidly exported to 3rd world, whose carbon emissions are skyrocketing)

Shifting from Conventional Utilities to Distributed Energy Ownership

and Generation• Good article (2014) here. Summary:• “Vattenfall, a Swedish utility with the second-biggest

generation portfolio in Germany, saw $2.3 billion in losses in 2013 due to ‘fundamental structural change’ in the electricity market. The problem is well documented: high penetrations of renewables with legal priority over fossil fuels are driving down wholesale market prices -- sometimes causing them to go negative -- and quickly eroding the value of coal and natural gas plants. At the same time, Germany's energy consumption continues to fall while renewable energy development rises.”

• All it took is strong legal framework. Government commitment to a renewable future.

• Will it continue? Uncertain, as subsidies are ending

• “To make matters worse for (conventional fossil fuel) utilities, their commercial and industrial customers are increasingly trying to separate themselves from the grid to avoid government fees levied to pay for renewable energy expansion. According to the Wall Street Journal, 16 percent of German companies are now energy self-sufficient -- a 50 percent increase from just a year ago. Another 23 percent of businesses say they plan to become energy self-sufficient in the near future.”

B. Reducing Carbon from Existing Energy Sources

• We produce 35 billion tons of CO2 per year… ideas for capture:• Using microalgae to remove CO2 from coal flue gas. Acidic flue gas reduces

CO2 uptake greatly.• The Economics of CO2 Separation and Capture (Herzog MIT, late ’90’s)• Other processes have been considered to capture the CO2 from the flue

gas of a power plant -- e.g., membrane separation, cryogenic fractionation, and adsorption using molecular sieves – but they are even less energy efficient and more expensive than chemical absorption. This can be attributed, in part, to the very low CO2 partial pressure in the flue gas. Therefore, two alternate strategies to the “flue gas” approach are under active consideration – the “oxygen” approach and the “hydrogen” or “syn-gas” approach.

• Herzog estimated that by 2012 CO2 removal from coal flue gas would cost as little as 1.5 cents per kWhr (but it hasn’t worked out that way. At all).

• Gasify’ing coal allows up to 65% of the CO2 to be captured, according to industry sources. Are such “industry sources” to be trusted? I don’t know…

• IPCC Report on Carbon Capture• Again, strong flavor to “rosy up” the projections by policy people, vs. energy

analyst Vaclav Smil who estimates scrubbing 20% from our emissions would take 70% more than the entire capacity of the petroleum industry flow rate.

Land Use Changes – Carbon Capture by Plants

• Alan Savory shows how reducing overgrazing by judiciously confining and moving cattle around on rangeland can make a healthier grassland, sequestering carbon in the root systems and helping with desertification.

• But topsoil is on average only 8” deep (and getting thinner), and once filled with roots, it’s very slow to build new topsoil (1 to 2 cm per thousand years)

• Also, even if there is some value in moving cattle this way, it’s a labor-intensive activity and such costs are not addressed. There’s nothing brilliant about this sort of basic cattle raising, and if it hasn’t already been done by ranchers it’s most likely very costly, especially on a global scale.

• COST of food is just not addressed, and high cost of food globally causes revolutions.

Organic Farming and Carbon Sequestration in Soil

• Soil can hold more carbon in roots, but only until the topsoil has a climax community above it, and topsoil is (on average) only 8 inches deep.

• Claims that organic farming can sequester enough carbon to halt CO2 rise (Rodale study), neglect this key fact. No doubt a global return to organic farming would allow a significant (but one-time) increase in carbon sequestration

• It would be a good thing to do… BUT...• We can’t afford to, and still feed 7 billion people affordably. We have put

our soils on steroids, stripping them of natural nutrients and force-feeding nitrogen chemical fertilizers, and used today’s massive Ag practices precisely because this is the most cost-effective way to get crops out of the soil, and price means everything to a farmer. We see riots when basic staple crops rise in price even by just 20-30%, (e.g. “Arab Spring” revolutions)

• Worse, modern Ag practices are causing topsoil loss of 1%/year, and a recent Scientific American article estimates we have only 60 years of topsoil left at current trends.

Stop Tropical and Mid-Latitude Deforestation.

• Deforestation adds carbon to the atmosphere in two ways – by ending the sequestering happening in living trees and by letting the carbon they have already sequestered, slowly or rapidly (slash/burn) return to the atmosphere

• Also, hurts low cloud formation, and doesn’t alter albedo enough to compensate for these warming forcings.

• New initiatives in tropical Africa may replant trees on millions of acres of land

Boreal (far North) Forests: Not So Clear They Help

• It’s not clear whether deforestation in the far north helps or hurts climate, as deforested land here reflects more sunlight, even though it doesn’t sequester the same amount of carbon. Bala et al. 2007 find albedo heating effect dominates the carbon sequestration effect

• Remember that carbon can only be removed from the atmosphere by a tree until the tree reach full adult size

• But, brighter treeless landscape is a permanent cooling forcing to climate, by reflecting more sunlight.

… Rebuttal from Nelson et al. 2010

• However, unlike tropical forests, Boreal forests sequester 85% of their carbon underground, and tree loss will cause much more carbon release than just the tree mass Bala assumed.

• Also, climate change is already reducing snow coverage in spring and summer, when albedo matters, so albedo changes may not be as significant.

• They conclude preserving Boreal forests is a necessary part of combating climate change

If Yours is Goal #1 – To Halt Climate Change…

• We’ll have to do all of the above, and much more – we’ll have to quickly undo the damage we’ve done, and reverse the existing climate forcing.

• A. Removing carbon from the atmosphere• B. GeoEngineering strategies to cool the

Earth• C. Population Control, Other Policy

Strategies

A. Removing Carbon from the Atmosphere

Strategy: Plant Trees - have evolved over millions of years to extract CO2 and

sequester it as hydrocarbons

• Advantage:

1. Low tech! Given the political will, millions of people could be employed immediately to plant trees with minimal training. This is vital – we need IMMEDIATE solutions in order to avoid long term disaster

• New initiatives in tropical Africa may replant trees on millions of acres of land

Planting parties – fun! Build a sense of shared effort towards our future

But, Tree Planting Looks to be Too Little and Too Late

• --- Where do we plant them? The reason most of our forests are gone is that we wanted that land to grow crops and pave over for cities and houses. Over 90% of all arable land on Earth has already been converted to agriculture and human use.

• --- In a rapidly changing climate, can we plant trees in a place where they will thrive for decades to come?

• --- Worse, tree planting will only help a little: This IPCC report, described more digestably in this article, finds that planting trees will only sequester about 1.4 gigatons of CO2 per year; vs 35 gigatons of human-generated CO2 emissions per year.

• In other words, only ~5% of current emissions.• It turns out to be even trickier…..

Trees: Albedo vs. Carbon Uptake • The dark color of forests means they absorb more solar energy than the grasses

that would replace them, and according to one study, actually heat the Earth, with the effect stronger at higher latitudes. (Bala et.al. 2007)

• Especially true in the far north, where winter snow is highly reflective while dark conifers absorb sunlight. In the tropics, there’s ~no snow so the difference in albedo is much smaller – thus the dominant effect is the longer term sequestration of carbon that trees provide.

• There are three other effects of trees that both cool climate:• --- 1. Evapo-transpiration; taking water from the ground and evaporating in

leaves into the air absorbs the latent heat of evaporation from the environment• --- 2. This evaporation also promotes the formation of low clouds, which also

cool climate• --- 3. Trees take up CO2 out of the atmosphere to build their tissues

• So there are 3 cooling effects, and one heating effect of trees. Finding out the net of these was the subject of the Bala et.al. study. See summaries here Lawrence Livermore Labs 2006 study, and also here.

• Lee et.al. (2011) claim that the cooling effect of clearing high latitude forests is not just theoretical, but shown in real data. Still, the issue is very complex and other studies find losing boreal forests will warm climate, not cool it.

• Bottom Line: Reforestation is best in the tropics to lower middle latitudes. From latitudes of the northern U.S. northward, reforestation’s effect on climate is controversial

Simulated temporal evolution of atmospheric CO2 (Upper) and 10-year running mean of surface temperature change (Lower) for the period 2000–2150 in the Standard and Deforestation experiments. Warming effects of increased atmospheric CO2 are more than offset by the cooling biophysical effects of Global deforestation in the Global case, producing a cooling relative to the Standard experiment of ≈0.3 K around year 2100. Bala et.al. 2006.

Simulated cumulative emissions and carbon stock changes in atmosphere, ocean, and land for the period 2000–2150 in (A) Standard and (B) Global deforestation experiments. In Standard, strong CO2 fertilization results in

vigorous uptake and storage of carbon by land ecosystems. In the deforestation case, land ecosystem carbon is lost to the atmosphere. Most of

this carbon is ultimately reabsorbed by grasses and shrubs growing in a warmer CO2-fertilized climate at year 2100.

Of the land eco-system carbon in the Standard simulation that is not present in the land biosphere in the Global case at year 2100, 82% resides in the atmosphere

and the remaining 18% in the oceans.

Let’s Ponder The Implications

• Before thinking about clear-cutting boreal forests, note that the released carbon goes into the atmosphere and the oceans

• The resulting greenhouse heating effect in the atmosphere is slightly less than is the expected cooling due to the more reflective grasses (and seasonal snow) that replace trees.

• However, from reading the papers, it’s not clear that they have included the fact that there is little or no snow to be reflective in spring and certainly summer, especially as temperatures soar in the Arctic

• Also, the carbon going into the ocean worsens acidification

Still, Albedo vs. Carbon Storage is a Problem

• Kirchbaum et al. 2011 basically confirm Bala et al. that this is a problem.

• They measured the albedo of a pine forest vs. meadow w/o trees in mid-latitude New Zealand over time, and find that carbon capture of trees rises with their age, but still, the net climate effect is that the warming due to lower albedo more than compensates for the climate cooling due to CO2 sequestration

Warming vs. Cooling: Net Climate Effect of Planting Trees (Gibbard et al. 2005). Only in Tropics does tree

carbon capture and cooling dominate

Natural Vegetation Changes due to Rising CO2 Levels

• Port et al. (2012) model expected rising CO2’s effects on vegetation for 300 years

• Find fertilization due to rising CO2 causes boreal forests to spread north, deserts to slightly shrink.

• By including the rise in carbon sequestered by CO2-fertilized plants, the reduced greenhouse warming is 0.22 C

• 0.22C is only a tiny fraction of the net ~7 C rise in global temperatures

From Port et al. 2012

U.S. forests are currently taking up carbon in excess of releasing it. This is as expected on land that has had most of its forests

already cut. Halting further tree cutting would sequester carbon even more than currently. This is even more true in the tropical

rain forests where clear cutting is rampant

Deforestation and the Ocean

• Other vegetation change simulations give similar results• Note in the previous graph that in the global deforested

case, the ocean takes up much more CO2 than in the ‘standard’ case. While global temperatures may not change much by 2150 between the ‘standard’ and ‘global deforested’ cases, the oceans suffer much more by deforestation, and that CO2 must further acidify the ocean.

• Planting mid and high latitude trees to take up carbon should perhaps be seen more as a strategy for minimizing ocean acidification and its dire consequences, and not as much a direct global warming solution, because it darkens the landscape and so absorbs more sunlight.

Artificial Trees – Currently an evolving research project with promise to remove CO2 from the

atmosphere

As of 2014, newer conception of Air Capture Installations from Lackner

Some Early Resources on this Idea

• Lackner video lecture on our Carbon dilemma (53 min) at SUNY Stonybrook

• Video interview (5 min)• Good quantitative overview of the carbon

dilemma, from DOE and Lackner• Demonstration video of artificial tree, BBC

2009• NovaScienceNow video 2008 (12 min)• Yale Environment 360 op/ed

Some Bullet Points on the CO2 Capture ideas of Lackner et al.

• Need 7 typical (real) trees just to pull out of the air the CO2 generated by one breathing human being (476 lb/yr)

• We’re injecting the equivalent of 126 billion people’s worth of CO2 into the atmosphere

• Pulling CO2 by Lackner’s resin is very energy intensive. This is why I suggest nuclear may be the way to power them.

• Since CO2 rapidly moves through air, can pull it out from anywhere. The resin idea works poorly at low temperature and in high humidity; Therefore, site them in deserts at mid latitudes for best results.

• Pack the “trees” around nuclear power plants above carbon sequestration sites?

• Now – the American Physical Society’s evaluation (2011) and a summary: Bottom line, uneconomical until all large point-source carbon emitters are already thoroughly scrubbed.

• But Lenton & Vaughn 2009 conclude: “In the most optimistic scenarios, air capture and storage by BECS, combined with afforestation and bio-char production appears to have the potential to remove 100 ppm of CO2 from the atmosphere…”

• (BECS= Bio-Energy with Carbon Sequestration)

• …We need to scrub CO2 out of the existing carbon energy sources, and also pull and sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere. Both, at the same time, and rapidly abandon fossil fuels altogether.

• Even if we end all CO2 emissions immediately, global temperatures are already high enough to melt a significant fraction, and perhaps nearly all, of the Earth’s ice, given a few centuries of melting. Global sea levels would rise many 10’s of meters, submerging nearly all of the Earth’s great cities where presently sited.

• The characterization of CO2 removal from the air as a “non-starter” – is a non-starter. We need to “start” all of the above.

The real point should be – we need to do it all – Immediately.

Lackner’s early and (now clearly) overly optimistic quantitative

evaluation of the artificial tree idea…

• Claimed can remove CO2 a thousand times faster than real trees (!)

• Emits only 200g of CO2 for every kg of CO2 removed from the air

• Each “tree” costs about the same as a new car, and removes 90,000 tons of carbon per year.

Compare Lackner’s Artificial Trees to Real Trees (as of 2009)

• Real trees: 7 trees to remove 1 human’s worth of CO2 production (476 lb/yr)

• Lackner’s “tree”: claim - 1000x more efficient than real trees.

• Would need 100 million Lackner trees to remove as much CO2 as we are emitting

• Would need 100 billion real trees to do the same.

• Source for these figures is here

Let’s Run Some Simple Figures…

• 100 billion additional trees would require:• At 33 ft x33 ft = 1000 ft2 per tree as a ballpark rough

number, means • 1000 ft2 /tree x 100x109 trees = 1014 ft2

• = Area of United States = 1.06 x1014 ft2

• In other words, we’d need to plant additional real trees on a tree farm as large as the United States to soak up all the CO2 emissions. That sounds very hard to do

• If Lackner’s claims are correct, we’d need only 1/1000 of this area, or about ¾ of the area of Los Angeles County, if we still allow 1000 ft2 per artificial tree. This sounds do-able… IF Lackner’s claims are correct

• His business venture in this direction folded up in 2012. Not clear where the artificial tree idea is going today.

2014 Update on Air Capture

• Lackner estimates cost of $1,000/ton of CO2 capture (much higher than his original estimates of a few years back).

• Still, it’s ~15x more efficient than real trees at CO2 capture. And we need efficiency!

• What’s a planet worth? • Carbon tax/dividend is logical source of

funding, since CO2 is GLOBAL diffused

Where to put the carbon is still an

issue…

Injecting CO2 into underground porous spaces• Norwegians have been putting

1 million tons of CO2 per year back into the ground undersea. • The Utsira Sand has pore-space volume of ~600 km3. 6 km3 would

be sufficient to store 50 years emissions from ~20 coal-fired or ~50

gas-fired 500 MW power-stations. Not remotely enough for global

….but• Remember that China alone has been stoking

up 1 coal-fired power plant PER WEEK. (albeit slowing here in 2015)

• "Global Coal Risk Assessment: Data Analysis and Market Research," released on 11/20/2011, estimated there are currently 1,199 proposed coal plants in 59 countries. China and India together account for 76 percent of these plants.

• The United States is seventh, with 36 proposed new coal-fired power plants.

• Update 2015: most of these are now shelved, with the drop in coal prices

The industry buzz about natural gas as the new energy source (“thanks” to fracking) in 2011 thankfully looking pretty wrong these days

Artificial photosynthesis

An electrochemical cell uses energy from a solar collector or a wind turbine to convert CO2 to simple carbon fuels such as formic acid or methanol, which are further refined to make ethanol and other fuels.

• Very energy intensive, but recent discovery of a catalyst – an ionic liquid electrolyte (Rosen et.al. 2011) may make it energetically viable

• Process involves converting CO2 into (poisonous) carbon monoxide as a first step. Safety issues?

Capturing CO2 by way of Accelerated Weathering of

Limestone• Rau et.al. find this a viable process for capturing CO2 from fossil fuel

power plants, converting it to calcium bicarbonate through the reaction…

• Cost estimated at ~$25/ton of CO2 sequestered

• http://aftre.nssga.org/Symposium/2004-09.pdf• If these costs can be realized, this looks relatively economical• What to do with the calcium bicarbonate? It only exists as an

aqueous solution at standard atmospheric conditions, so the volumes required mean it would have to go into the oceans, presumably. How would this affect ocean chemistry?

Rau method w/ outflow to the ocean results in minimal pH and pCO2 effects vs. letting atmospheric CO2 directly

diffuse into surface waters

Rau’s Process is the Most Promising CO2 removal mechanism I’ve yet found for scaling up to GeoEngineering scales

• Requires ready source of limestone, so could only be done on large scale from certain coastal locations

• Results in equilibrium pH change in ocean, after 1000 years, of -0.0014 per 35B tons CO2 processed. (35B tons/yr is current rate we’re injecting CO2 into atmosphere) (my calculation), and this is acceptable in terms of its effect on ocean life (compare to ocean slide show on pH rate of change today)

• More figures and power requirements should be done, but the basic paper provides enough to do this – it’s worth a careful examination, if/when we get serious about removing atmospheric CO2 before it’s too late.

• Rau and Lackner – together! (but behind paywall!)

Related: Add CaCO3=Calcium Carbonate Powder Directly to the Ocean?

• Harvey et al. 2012 suggest this, although it would take decades to have an effect on fighting acidification, and it would be tiny

• Would (marginally) help the ocean absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, but plenty of limestone is already in contact with the oceans along many shorelines worldwide

• 10% of the Earth’s surface is covered by limestone.• Add CaCO3 to upwelling areas, sequester an additional

0.3 billion tons of CO2 per year (1% of what we add to air by fossil fuel burning).

• Would seem to be a pretty minimal effect, and Stanford’s Ken Caldeira agrees

• Bottom line – doesn’t look promising

Drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere and using it to make carbonates - limestone rock (Belcher

et.al. 2010)• … a process which happens naturally by ocean life (but too slowly,

and cannot happen at all in a too-acidic ocean such as rapid CO2 rise is creating).

• Major problems to be overcome; the amount of energy required in the process, scaling up to the levels needed to affect our atmosphere, sourcing calcium, and cost, among others.

• Given that humans have injected an additional 1.2 trillion tons of CO2 over the past 250 years, the Belcher et.al. process would require ~2.4 trillion tons of CaCO3, and at 2.71 g/cc density of calcium carbonate,

• This would require building 8x1017 cc's of rock, or a cube 1 million centimeters on a side, which is equivalent to a block the height of Mt. Everest (30,500 ft on a side) from sea level.

• That's also going to require a lot of calcium. Calcium is common, but mostly it is found as - calcium carbonate! Destroying CaCO3 in order to make CaCO3 is questionable, except that we might hope to use low-carbon energy (nuclear) to make this round trip(?)… that’s frankly very speculative at this point.

• Bottom Line: This is NOT the most promising strategy

Start Smaller?• To instead immediately drop current CO2 atmospheric levels from 400

ppm to 350 ppm would required a cube of calcium carbonate of only 22,180 ft on a side; still higher than any mountain in the Western Hemisphere.

• At current production rates of ~35 billion tons of CO2 per year, it requires an additional cube-shaped mountain 7,500 ft on a side every year.

• Is it possible to build "scrubbers" for the atmosphere that could accomplish such a vast task? Where do we put it all - the ocean? We'd better make sure ocean acidification levels don't reach levels (as they will this century, on our current trajectory) that begin to dissolve existing oceanic calcium carbonate. When that happens, the problems we have been presenting so far will pale by comparison.

• Maybe besides putting it in the ocean, we could take a clue from the ancient Egyptians… There is something satisfying about visualizing oil company executives conscripted to toil under the hothouse conditions on 21st Century Earth building the Great Carbon Pyramids - pyramids of calcium carbonate (or containers of calcium bicarbonate, as the case may be) miles high, sufficient to clean up our atmosphere. And, at wages comparable to those of the poor souls who built the pyramids of Egypt. Likely we’d find people who would donate the necessary land just for the satisfaction of watching them toil.

Creating carbon fuels on-the-fly, rather than mining fossil fuels

Gasoline and gasoline substitutes are attractive because…• --- transportation vehicles (trucks, cars, trains) require very high energy

density power sources, and gasoline is hard to beat. • --- we have existing infrastructure to deliver• --- require little modification to existing vehicles to utilize• But….• Corn-based biofuels make little sense. They consume 30% more energy in

growth/manufacture than they give. Other problems:• --- commandeer valuable farmland which could go to food• --- vast acreage of tropical forests are cleared to produce sugar cane, palm

oil, and cereal grains destined for ethanol. Clearing tropical forests adds both heat and CO2 to the atmosphere

• --- biofuels leave soils poorer, are supplemented with artificial fertilizers, which add nitrous oxide and other pollutants to the atmosphere in their manufacture, and are heavy water users.

• --- they nevertheless are being pursued, incentivized by government subsidies for growers, who grease the pockets of the appropriate government decision-makers

• --- accounting for carbon flows is deeply flawed on the part of the proponents of corn and sugar ethanol biofuels. This strategy is not carbon neutral

Good: Cellulosic Ethanol

• A Berkeley study published in Science (Farrell et al. 2006) finds the cellulosic ethanol has significant advantages over fossil fuel in the making of gasoline

• Cellulosic ethanol many times more efficient and lower carbon footprint than corn-based or other ethanol’s.

(A) Net energy and net greenhouse gases for gasoline, six studies, andthree cases. (B) Net energy and petroleum inputs for the same.

Small light blue circles are reported data that include incommensurateassumptions, whereas the large dark blue circles are adjusted values that use

identical system boundaries. Conventional gasoline is shown with red stars, andEBAMM scenarios are shown with green squares. Adjusting system boundariesreduces the scatter in the reported results. Moreover, despite large differences in

net energy, all studies show similar results in terms of more policy-relevantmetrics: GHG emissions from ethanol made from conventionally grown corn can

be slightly more or slightly less than from gasoline per unit of energy, butethanol requires much less petroleum inputs. Ethanol produced from cellulosicmaterial (switchgrass) reduces both GHGs and petroleum inputs substantially.

Better: Microbe-based fuel producers?

• Bio-engineered bacteria at MIT produce isobutanol – a burn-able fuel. It appears it may be feasible to scale this up to industrial scales.

• Algae-based diesel production. The company Algenol claims to be able to produce over 6,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year, compared to corn’s rate of 370 gallons per acre per year. That’s 15 times more!

• In 2015, Algenol plans to open their first commercial facility, for producing ethanol from algae

• Algae-based fuels may be viable, as judged in this paper on alternative energy economics and investments

• However, energy analyst Vaclav Smil thinks biofuels are completely cost/energy absurd (but I have no figures to give here, yet)

Biodiesel from Algae

From Algenol’s website

Vertical hangers better utilize space, but lose some incoming sunlight

We have TOO MANY people competing for TOO FEW resources on this finite planet

• However, a major point is that ANY method of producing significant quantities of biofuels are going to have a major impact on raising prices for competing resources. For ethanols, the dilemma is “food-vs.-fuel”, and for cellulosic it is (to some extent) “everything-vs.-fuel”…

• Cellulosic ethanol led to price rises in pulp such that Mexicans were unable to buy tortillas, and wood pellet factories pricing dairy farmers out of the market for sawdust.

All Biofuels Share a Common Problem

• They emit CO2 back into the atmosphere!• At their most perfect manifestation, they are at

best “carbon neutral”.• That’s not good enough. However, it’s

certainly better than the vastly “carbon positive” fuels we have going currently

So, we’ve had alternative fuels employed now for going on 20 years. How are we doing on reducing CO2 emissions? Answer: CO2 is not going down, not staying level, nor merely increasing

linearly… rather, it continues to accelerate upward as of 2014.

Maybe we need more Drastic Measures…

D. GeoEngineering

• (No, not the conspiracy buff’s “spraying the populace” nonsense. The word first came into being to refer to engineering efforts which would affect the globe; here, for climate)

• Launch billions of “butterflies” to the L1 point between Earth and Sun, to block sunlight. Must be actively controlled to keep them there. (Angel et al. 2007)

Or… Move one or more asteroids to the L1 Lagrangian point between us and Sun, and sputter

dust off of it to attenuate sunlight

Tug an asteroid to the L1 Lagrangian Point, keep it there and blast off dust to

block sunlight from Earth?• A related idea which avoids having to launch occulting objects

from Earth is to nudge a suitable asteroid or asteroids into a proper orbit so that we can blast dust off of it and let the dust be a partial absorber of sunlight.

• This would seem quite dangerous to attempt and far too difficult to engineer right now (we need something NOW!). But you can read the paper (Bewick et al. 2012) and see what you think. You can read more opinions here.

• There is precedent, in that there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that comet impact(s) / debris associated with the Taurid Meteor Shower may have been the culprit which initiated the Younger-Dryas cooling 12,900 years ago which reversed the exit from the last great Ice Age and cooled the Earth for an additional 1000 years (Napier 2010 and references therein)

Injecting Reflective Aerosols into the Stratosphere

• This would mimic the effect of large volcanic eruptions in their climate effect, and so we are confident they would indeed cool the planet

• My (cynical) thought – why not just encourage through direct Big Coal Corporate subsidies, the construction of more coal mines, coal plants, with very tall smoke stacks??

• Let’s make the world’s air look like China’s!• Oh, I forgot – we already subsidize fossil fuel

corporations in the amount of $1,000,000,000,000 in 2012 alone (source)

Are These Sun-Shade Strategies Really a Long Term Solution?

Big Problems • 1. Sulfate aerosols are toxic (sulfuric acid) and would come down out

of the stratosphere on a ~few years time scale at most. So need constant injection, which becomes a long term expense.

• Acid rain on our surface water. I’ve got no figures on how significant this would be.

• Sulfate aerosol reduction was blamed for massive acidification of lakes, before the Clean Air Act of the 1970’s

• 2. Energy required to get the sulfates up there. Dozens or hundreds of cubic kilometers of material raised into the stratosphere VERY energy-costly!

• They cool only daytime, not night time temperatures (hurt cooling!)• 4. Astronomers would not be happy (but, they’re not a significant

voting block, so who cares?)• 5. Aesthetics – permanently smoggy hazy skies everywhere. Anyone

who’s lived in a smoggy city like I have, wheezes just thinking about it, and finds this pretty depressing.

• 6. Most serious – ALL shade strategies at best only cool the planet, they do nothing to help the problem of CO2-induced ocean acidification if we continue to burn carbon

• But as a desperation measure to halt temperature rise and therefore ice loss and sea level rise, they should continue to be investigated.

Enhance carbon capture by the ocean phytoplankton by enhanced

upwelling through pumps/pipes

• Looked at by Lovelock and Rapley (2007) and discussed here

• And also in this promotional video by Atmocean Inc. here

• Early evaluation: Too slow to matter (see next page), and quite possibly very dangerous to ocean ecosystems

Radiative Forcings of GeoEngineering Some Strategies (Lenton & Vaughn 2009)

Can We Get Off Fossil Fuels? In Some Countries - Yes

But Fossil Fuel burning is skyrocketing in the new

manufacturing hubs of Asia

• We’ve only out-sourced our greenhouse gas generation to Asia, as they make all the cool STUFF we crave.

Oil exec’s have said current carbon tax proposals of ~$10/ton of CO2 can be successfully incorporated into their

business plans

• But the whole POINT is to DESTROY these business plans! Because they are DESTROYING our future!

• The tax must be high enough to be crippling to fossil fuel use, to radically and immediately motivate strong change.

• $1,000+ per ton of CO2, is needed in order to fund atmospheric CO2 removal in amounts significant to climate, according to Klaus Lackner

Global Fossil Fuel Use is Rising Faster than Renewables, although slowing in 2015

Humans are over-taxing the ability of the planet to support life. The “green revolution” helped moderate the growing overshoot during the 1977-2000

period, but now is being swamped by the rising aspiring “standard of living” of the 3rd World. All the while, our degradation of the land and ocean is lowering

the biocapacity of the Earth

Business-As-Usual here is clearly impossible. In 2008 we were using up 1.5 Earth’s of resources, possible only by steeply depleting our topsoil, stripping our oceans, and draining thousands of years of

groundwater. That can’t continue much longer.

We’re causing the extinction of other species at a rate now much faster than human population rise. Why? The discovery of millions of years of photosynthetic solar

energy locked in buried fossil fuel has multiplied our impact on the planet. Humans now take more than 1/3 of the primary productivity of the Earth

Externalized Costs Must be Converted to True Costs

• Externalized costs is a vast and pervasive flaw in the laissez faire paradigm. What would fossil fuel companies have to charge for their products if they were forced to pay for…

• --- the destruction of the 217,490 miles of the planet's current coastlines?...

• ---the costs of insurance premiums caused by escalating weather extremes?

• ---the costs of wars to be fought over food and water as climate zones shift too rapidly for agriculture to adapt to?

• ---the cost of destroying the ocean's ecosystems through acidification by CO2?

• --- Compensating most of the world’s population for rendering uninhabitable the land they live on now?

• This list could go on, of course…. What if those costs were then returned, dollar-for-dollar, directly to those who will pay those costs - all of us, and our children? This would provide overwhelming incentive to drastically cut CO2 emissions and scale up non-fossil energy sources such as nuclear and photovoltaics.

Subsidies to Fossil Fuel Corporations

• Global subsidies to fossil fuel companies is estimated in 2012 to have risen from $775 Billion to $1 trillion, although precise figures are difficult to know because so many countries hide the figures.

• Latest estimate is ~$1.5 trillion• These should end. Immediately.

The Carrying Capacity of Earth - Reducing Population

• Burning through in a few hundred years the Earth's store of fossil fuels - an inheritance which took many tens of millions of years to create, is symptom of a larger problem. We on Earth have been living far beyond the ability of the planet to sustainably support.

• Humans and our domesticated livestock have gone from being 0.1% of the biomass of all land vertebrates 10,000 years ago to now being 97% today.

• We're losing 1% of the Earth's topsoil every year, due to typical agriculture practices. Topsoil is irreplacable on anything but geologic time scales.

• World population is projected to reach 9.5 billion by mid-century.

• Our planet can, with current technology, support this many people sustainably only at a standard of living equivalent to today's Ethiopia, according to a number of studies at Stanford University (links here and here).

• Ethiopia has one of the harshest standards of living on Earth.

Ethiopia – A Land of Widespread Grinding Poverty

Population Policies Need to be Far More Drastic Than you Might Imagine

• Bradshaw and Brook (2014) did a careful study, using accurate demographics for each country, with different scenarios for policy, including of what 1-child-per-family, instituted worldwide, today, would do to human population trends….

• Gradual transition to 1-child-per-family by 2045 results in eventual population drop after mid-century, but is still as high as 4 billion in the year 2100

• Meanwhile, China just cancelled it’s “one child per family” policy.

• Out-breeding other countries – is this a good strategy to dominate a dwindling planet?

Our Population, Industrial Output, Non-renewable Resources, and Pollution are All

on Overshoot-and-Crash Trajectories

Consumption vs. Income

• It will always be true – if you want more of something, tax it less. If you want less of it, tax it more. Therefore…

• Eliminate all income taxes and fund government strictly through consumption taxes (progressivity could still be added in as a secondary step)

• Motivate reduction in consumption and instead motivate saving and therefore capital investment in the changes which must be made

Correlation: Intelligence vs. the Willingness to Tolerate Short-term Discomfort for Long-term Reward

• I'm haunted by the results of the classic Stanford "delayed gratification" studies (and here) of children, which show that the willingness to delay gratification for ultimately larger reward in 4-year olds is predictive of later measures of intelligence and success in life.

• We as a planet behave like the immediate gratification 4 year olds in these studies, preferring to eat through our seed corn now rather than clearly acknowledge what that means for our future.

• What's interesting about the studies is that the choice is so easily grasped by all (1 candy now, or 2 candies if you wait a bit), that it is not a test of the ability to understand what is being asked…

• It is a test of the willingness to pause and make real in one's mind what the future will hold, vs. simply avoiding that awareness in order to indulge short-term wishes.

Reducing Population size has another aspect…reducing the size of existing people! Obese people

use up excess resources just like additional people do. Enough corporate-promoted junk food, please!

Also relates to delayed gratification studies

Game Theory Says – We’re Doomed

• A study applying Game Theory and Nash equilbria (remember, “A Beautiful Mind”?) finds that climate negotiations will fail. Experiments with real individuals verified this, as does every day’s real-world headlines.

• When given realistic rules and choices, including a certain amount of uncertainty as to when we hit the tipping point and climate catastrophe is inevitable, competitive negotiators will not do the right thing.

• Why? Selfish interests, trying to get the other guy to make the carbon sacrifice instead of you.

• In a system of competitive players within a global atmosphere, Mutual Assured Destruction is the result.

• Read the details here

Along the Same Lines…

• A History of Climate Change Negotiations in 83 seconds… (you’ll laugh, you’ll cry)

The Problem Goes Deeper Still• The Culture of Growth as THE Primary Value and Goal

to Achieve Human Well-Being• Endless growth on a finite planet must end. We have

reached that point.• Efficiency increases, better insulation, more renewable

energy sources, etc etc... only make the problem WORSE - not better. Despite huge improvements in the technologies of efficiency and steep drops in the cost of solar panels, the rate of CO2 and methane release is not only not decreasing, not only is it not staying the same, not only is it not trending upward merely at a constant slope - it's actually accelerating. Why?

• The reason is that we are taking those savings and simply using them to indulge in additional uses which further degrade the planet that must support us all.

Nolthenius’ 2nd Law: A Value will Attract Exploitation, thus Degrading it Until it is No Longer

More Valuable than Surrounding Values• This is analogous to the thermodynamics of heat. The heat

equation expresses this same idea. Heat (degradation) flows in to a non-degraded (cool) area at a rate corresponding to the gradient (i.e. how “great” the value difference is)

• Ponder why, when freeways are widened, the traffic quickly grows and the freeway is again clogged. Freeway widening only encourages more people to use the freeway, when instead, health and well-being would be improved better by cycling, walking.

• Another example – wonderful places to live: only end up attracting more people to the point that the “quality gradient” is extinguished – the town, the expense, the land… they degrade until it is no longer desirable enough to attract more people to it. I’ve watched this happen in Santa Cruz during my 28 years here. It’s still a more desirable place than most, so expect the degradation to continue.

What is Needed is a Change in Cultural Values. Happiness,

Genuine Well-Being, must be Re-Thought by the Average Voter

• See “The Conundrum” by David Owen• I’m going to stop here. This is getting to be

too deep to go further for this limited course! I hope I’ve stimulated you to think further….

K45: Key Points - Strategies• Shu (2008); Solar PV and Nuclear can provide practical large-scale non-fossil

power. Wind power rising rapidly as well.• Solar requires high quality battery technology to go “off grid”• Solar has many advantages: know them.• Existing point-source CO2 emitters are more economical to scrub than is the

atmosphere• CO2 and high temperatures are permanent, unless CO2 can be removed rapidly

from the atmosphere• Artificial trees to scrub CO2 from atmosphere – must be sited in mid-latitudes• Artificial trees; rapidly evolving, require high energy input, probably nuclear• CO2 must be removed from atmosphere before it is absorbed by the ocean, or

ocean life in peril and climate change truly permanent• World energy supplied by fossil (86%), and by non-fossil (14%) in ‘08• Renewable sustainable present technologies can support world’s current

population only at a standard of living equivalent to that of Ethiopia. Or, at current income distribution, can support about 2 billion people.

• Most promising carbon-neutral bio-fuel source appears to be algae-based• Reducing atmosphere CO2 from 400ppm to 280ppm by making calcium

carbonate would require a Mt. Everest sized cube• Game theory experiment show: climate negotiations will fail due to perceived

selfish interests• Single Biggest Climate Change Strategy: Policy of “Tax-and-Dividend”• Tragedy of the Commons, plus the Culture of Economic Growth as the top

societal value, insures environmental degradation for all.